Dodgeball

Dodgeball is a small multiplayer game which recreates the classic game of ‘Dodgeball’. Throw your ball at a player, or hold it to block incoming balls; or if you’re really brave try to catch a ball and get your teammates to spawn back in. Try to defeat the other team in various gamemodes on different maps; each with a unique setting that affects gameplay. Get your friends together and host a game for some fast-paced competitive fun. Dodgeball has been made with this friendly competition in mind.

Don’t have friends? Dodgeball now has AI bots that can play with you instead!

Features

Fast-paced gameplay

Various gamemodes; Classic, Team Deathmatch, Handball, and more coming throughout Early Access

Various maps; From a school gym to a low gravity moon, these maps affect the gameplay as well as being different

Special balls – Added to speed up gameplay, these balls can do a variety of things such as blow up, which is a good counter to someone using a ball to block!

AI Bots – Play against or with AI teammates so you’ll always be able to play regardless of other players online

CHRISTMAS UPDATE – The robots now have Santa hats…. yes, I know, how festive.

Dodgeball is in Early Access and will be evolving over time with added content and features. Please check this website for more information on future updates for the game. Please note it does not currently have any dedicated servers so servers will have to be hosted yourself, you might have to port forward your router if your hosted game does not show up for others. If you need help for this please post in the forums.

Why Early Access?

Early access is a good way to get feedback from the community. Already during testing some rather helpful, and other not so helpful suggestions have been made. Increasing the amount of people giving this feedback can help guide the development process, and more importantly help prioritise things. You can check out the roadmap for Dodgeball to see what the future might hold for the game and the progress of the game. There will also be polls regularly to vote on various features people might want. You can make these discussions in the Steam forum area and discuss them with other players. The alpha builds will try to release a new one every month at least, however there will be smaller updates throughout the month for bug fixes and small changes, there is also a development branch you can access where you can try the latest build of the game, but due to its ‘work-in-progress’ status, expect bugs and issues in those versions!

Future Plans

While nothing is promised in the fully released version, the main aim is to have the game at a more polished and playable state, and also with more content by the time it leaves early access. Most of these individual features are available to be seen on the road-map, and once enough features have been chosen, those will be worked on and once they are complete that will form the version 1.0 of the game. At the moment I do not know how many features or content will be in the final game, but it will have to be enough that satisfies the community. The 1.0 game might also include custom artwork and music, made specifically for the game. I cannot also promise a timeline for the 1.0 release however, I do expect it to take a few months at least. I do not want to leave the game in early access for more than 1 year. There is also a potential for it to be in VR in the far future but this might require a lot of work so will be done once out of early access.

Development History

The idea for Dodgeball came about when I needed an idea for a Game Jam during the early part of 2016. Its main intention was to focus mainly on Unreal Engine’s multiplayer framework and make something a little more different than a first person shooter. It was also to be made over two weeks so I couldn’t do lots of custom animations and artwork that would be required in a first person shooter. Playing Dodgeball at school was always really fun, and I’d like to think I’m pretty good at it (even though it has been many years now since I’ve played it) and was interested to see that a game on it has never been done before. Although it’s been suggested, I haven’t seen the movie of the same name for many years and actually only remembered it while making the gym map. You might find an item related to the movie within that map so have a look around during a warm up sometime.